INTRODUCTION 



The skill with which the individual grower 

 adapts these principles to his own problems 

 will mark his ultimate success or failure, and 

 as he grasps the fundamentals of his work he 

 should be able to answer his own questions bet- 

 ter than any one can answer them for him. 



The experienced grower may find in the book 

 some things that are new to him. It sometimes 

 happens that one does find new things in 

 books — even in books on horticulture. 



If some of these new things appear to be 

 contrary to what we have believed in the past, 

 I can only say that all of them have been given 

 the test of trial. Where new methods are men- 

 tioned they are based on experiments confined 

 not to a few trees but to some hundreds of acres, 

 and cover not months but years of work. 



To those who may wonder why there are no 

 pears in this book I would explain that years 

 ago, as a boy, I won first prize at the state fair 

 on some "Vicar" pears grown in my father's 

 yard. For the last twenty years, however, the 

 word "pear" has inevitably been associated in 

 my mind with the word "blight." This disease 

 has been so prevalent, so destructive and so 

 difficult to control that in my own orchards I 

 have eliminated the pear as a practical fruit. 

 To me it is almost in the class with the red 

 oedar tree, which harbors the fungus of the 

 rust on apples,— a thing to be got rid of rather 



